DECEMBER
Sweeping the country and the leafy valley, thy hand, reaching these purple and tan-colored lands that thine eyes discover below thee, is arrested by them on this rich brocade. All is quiet and muffled; no green shocks, nothing new and young jars on the composure of the scene, on the harmony of these full and hollow tones. A somber cloud occupies the whole sky, heaping with fog the cleft of the mountain. One might say that it was dovetailed into the horizon. With thy hand, December, caress these large adornments, tufts of black pine like brooches against the hyacinth of the plain; verify with thy fingers these details sunk in the enmeshing fog of this winter day: a row of trees, a village. Truly the hour is arrested. Like an empty theater, abandoned to melancholy, the sealed-up countryside seems to listen for a voice so shrill that I cannot hear it.
These afternoons in December are sweet. Nothing speaks as yet of the tormenting future, and the past is not yet so dead that it has no survivals. Of all the grass and ofsuch a great harvest nothing remains but strewn straw and dry brush. Cold water softens the ploughed earth. All is finished. This is the pause, the suspension, between one year and the next. Thought, delivered from her labor, gives herself up to recollection with a sweet taciturnity, and, meditating on new enterprises, like the earth she tastes her sabbath.